How To Thrive When Change Won’t Slow Down

GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

If you’ve ever written a book, you know that “publication day” is a fraught moment. All your hard work to publicize the book can easily be overtaken by news events. I’ve had author friends come out with a book on September 11th, or maybe it’s just a random CrowdStrike attack that shuts computers down worldwide, and pulls attention elsewhere. It could be anything. All that hard work goes down the drain.

So, for October 5th, when we launch Build a Better Future: 7 Mindsets for Navigating the Age of Acceleration, I’ve got my fingers crossed. I’m hoping for a slow news day. Yet, I’m realistic enough to know that anything could happen to distract attention. And in today’s world, it probably will.

We’re living during a time when unimaginable things are happening. It’s a unique inflection point in history, complete with breakthroughs and breakdowns, everywhere all at once. Established ways of operating are becoming outdated. Institutions are groaning under the weight of rapid change. Whether we identify it or not, many people are experiencing “future shock,” anxiety caused by too much change coming at us too fast.

With the arrival of generative AI on November 30th, 2022, we’ve moved past the familiar agricultural, industrial, and information ages. We’ve stepped squarely into the Acceleration Age. Combine AI’s arrival with authoritarianism, social media, attention fracking, climate change, tariff wars, and other what I call “MegaForces” of change, and the world is rearranging itself at a dizzying pace.

We are simply not prepared for the future that is arriving faster than ever. And that’s why I wrote the book that comes out on October 5th.

The premise of Build a Better Future is that understanding the fundamentally changed nature of this emerging landscape is essential if we want to avoid being left behind. But as someone who’s devoted his life to taking people higher, let me put it another way. If you want to thrive and flourish, regardless of externalities, studying how to create the future should be part of your curriculum.

I sometimes hear people say, “I don’t keep up with the news anymore, it’s so depressing.” That’s an understandable reaction, especially to political trends like rising authoritarianism, because that’s not what the founders of this country had in mind 250 years ago when they embarked on this bold experiment called the United States of America. But it’s a prescription for sitting on the bench while disaster strikes.

When you begin to adopt some of these seven mindsets outlined in the book, you stop feeling so overwhelmed. You start seeing farther ahead. You begin to see where this confluence of MegaForces is leading us, and how we need to shape them.

You develop what I call “future fluency” – the ability to speak the language of change. You start using change as a stepping stone instead of a stumbling block.

Based on studying the rate of acceleration, futurists like Gerd Leonhard and others estimate that there will easily be more change in the next 10 years than there has been over the past 100 years. We’re going to need to adopt future forecasting tools like scenario planning and applied imagination to our work and to our lives. If we don’t, we can end up giving people bad advice based on faulty assumptions.

For example, if your kid came to you and said they were going to study to become a software engineer, up until very recently, you’d endorse their decision without further thought. But with AI, all bets are suddenly off as to the future of that profession. The tech areas – Silicon Valley, Seattle area, etc. – are shedding tech jobs left and right.

In the course of my work with industries, I often hear variations on “we didn’t see it coming.” It could have been an industry consolidation change, or it could have been a demographic, social, technological, or geopolitical change. In other words, they were minding the store and serving customers, and wham, some external force that they knew about but hadn’t paid sufficient attention to turned their world upside down.

When you begin to live with these navigational mindsets, you become what I call change resilient. You start building, not just reacting. Not just defending. You start bouncing back faster from external events. You stop feeling overwhelmed. When you adopt the new tools of innovation, things can change for the better very fast. Your perspective changes. You feel empowered.

One of the ways is to challenge yourself and your team with challenging questions. Or with this set up: “As crazy as it may sound and as impossible as it may seem, what if we …” and then have them finish the sentence with as many ways as possible. It gets the juices flowing, and that’s the point. Given the bludgeoning amount of change, we’re all treading water, waiting for the next shoe to drop.

In the age of acceleration, your imagination will be more important than how much information you have, because data is abundant. The most important role you can play going forward is to get in touch with how you inspire possibility thinking in yourself, how you envision the way you want the future to unfold.

Nothing about the future is written in stone. The future is what we make it. We can build a better, more inclusive, more sustainable future by the way we think about the future. Starting today.

This article originally appeared in Forbes

Image credit: Gemini

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